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Dr. F., having been driven to sheer unholy madness by the mendacity, folly, and criminality of the Bush Administration, not to mention the uncouth, ungrammatical, and vacuous rhetoric of its principal, has retreated to a better but imaginary world.

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Saturday, March 31, 2012

I have a sneaking fondness for that old expression, but not for the actual 1 cent coin. It's somehow optimistic to think that even in the age of twitter, thoughts might actually be worth something. The coin, though, is simply a pain. It costs 2.4 cents to produce them and they are essentially a pure nuisance rather than facilitator in commerce.

Canada will withdraw the penny from circulation this year, saving taxpayers about C$11 million ($11 million) annually and forcing retailers to round prices to the nearest nickel, the government announced in its budget [Thursday].

We should do the same of course. And while we are at it, the Nickel is another bad deal - they cost about 10 cents to produce.

"[A]ny and all criticism of Israel not only can be
but must be antisemitic. It is either subjectively antisemitic, in that
it consciously and intentionally furthers the goals of the campaign; or it is
objectively antisemitic, in that it unconsciously and unintentionally does the
same thing. The distinction, if there ever was one, between the two, is now
meaningless. Either way, the result is the same: Those who seek to slaughter the
Jews en masse are brought a step closer to their goal," - Benjamin Kerstein, Pajamas Media.

The most fanatical elements of a movement seek to Force everyone to choose sides, since they think that that will make their side victorious. Thus Jews who dare to criticize any act of Israel's government or it's citizens, no matter how heinous, are singled out for the most vicious abuse as self-hating Jews. Other critics are anti-semites, effectively indistinguishable from the Nazis.

I don't think this kind of name calling works in the long run. Eventually intelligent people get tired of indulging the shrillest nutjobs and start thinking about their own interests. You ultimately must choose to be a partner of the crazed fanatics or to resist them. So far most American politicians are either disingenuous, gullible, or intimidated enough to bow before the worst excesses of Netanyahu and his settlers. I don't know how long that will work.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Muscles are pretty efficient at turning energy into motion. Apparently efficiencies as high as 70% can be achieved. To the naive former student of thermodynamics this may be a bit of a puzzle. Don't we recall that the ideal efficiency of a heat engine is given by Kelvin’s formula for the efficiency of a reversible Carnot engine: e =1-T/T’

If we apply that rule to muscles, where temperatures are nearly uniform, it would seem to imply that thermodynamic efficiency must be near zero, which is a lot less than 70%. It might appear that our biological systems are troubling the second law of thermodynamics.

Of course, physicists know that the second law always wins, so clearly our analysis has a flaw.

That flaw is that muscles are not heat engines, and they don’t exactly extract heat from one heat reservoir and transfer it to another. Instead, they extract energy from excited molecules (ATP) and transfer it to less excited molecules. E. T. Jaynes pointed out
that Gibbs seems to have understood this point in 1887, when he argued that the salient fact is the energy per degree of freedom of the respective molecules e = 1 –W/W’

In effect, the excited ATP molecule serves as an effective micro heat reservoir of temperature Teff = 2W/k, where W is the energy stored in its chemical bonds per degree of freedom. Those effective temperatures, says Jaynes, can be 20 times ambient temperatures, accounting for the high efficiencies of actual muscles. Thus our problem has been transformed back into a heat engine problem of a sort.

Of course modern chemical thermodynamics can doubtless handle this sort of problem more elegantly and comprehensively, but I always like simple pictures.

Yet another example of how meta-stable systems far from equilibrium are key to most of the interesting structure in our universe.

The Mega Million's lottery is estimating its next jackpot at a nominal $500 million, with a cash value of $359 million - before taxes, of course. That's real money by most people's standards. More to the point it's at least approaching the point where it makes sense for a well-heeled investor to buy every possible ticket to guarantee a win - at a cost of $175,711,536. Of course if a bunch of people do this, you will have to split the prize with them as well as any lucky bit players there might be.

I'm not to clear on the relevant tax laws, but it's at least plausible that your investment might be deductible.

I'm only in for a buck, but I like my odds, since I've already lost several times before ;)

Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. should be grateful to the Supreme Court for refusing to allow cameras in the courtroom, because his defense of Obamacare on Tuesday may go down as one of the most spectacular flameouts in the history of the court.
Stepping up to the podium, Verrilli stammered as he began his argument. He coughed, he cleared his throat, he took a drink of water. And that was before he even finished the first part of his argument. Sounding less like a world-class lawyer and more like a teenager giving an oral presentation for the first time, Verrilli delivered a rambling, apprehensive legal defense of liberalism's biggest domestic accomplishment since the 1960s—and one that may well have doubled as its eulogy.

This is just bizarre. Verrilli is an experienced guy. He's been involved in loads of Supreme Court cases and has personally argued more than a dozen.

So is Obama determined to boot the so-called signature accomplishment of his administration. What the heck is going on?

Monday, March 26, 2012

Paul Krugman turns over a big flat rock and finds something not very pretty: The American Legislative Exchange Council, AKA, ALEC. ALEC is a very aggressive lobby that doesn't just advise legislators, it writes their legislation for them. They turn out to be big players in the crony capitalism racket: writing laws that ship taxpayer dollars to big corporations.

Florida’s now-infamous Stand Your Ground law, which lets you shoot someone you consider threatening without facing arrest, let alone prosecution, sounds crazy — and it is. And it’s tempting to dismiss this law as the work of ignorant yahoos. But similar laws have been pushed across the nation, not by ignorant yahoos but by big corporations.

Specifically, language virtually identical to Florida’s law is featured in a template supplied to legislators in other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization that has managed to keep a low profile even as it exerts vast influence (only recently, thanks to yeoman work by the Center for Media and Democracy, has a clear picture of ALEC’s activities emerged). And if there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin’s killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society — and our democracy.

ALEC, which turns out to be funded by the usual villains like the Kochs and Exxon Mobile also get money from more mainstream corporations like Coca-Cola and UPS. A lot of its core business, though is crime. According to Krugman, it is a pillar of the American Bail Coalition and the prison industry.

Ever wonder why the US has the largest fraction of its population in prison of any country since the Soviet Gulags? Why our prison population has skyrocketed? ALEC and its funders get some of the credit. ALEC is also in the school privatization business.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Since the onset of the great recession, there has been a pitched battle among economists and policy makers over the proper governmental response. Austerity has been championed by economists of the freshwater school and those Paul Krugman calls the Very Serious People (VSP) of Europe and the American Right. Krugman and Brad DeLong have been fairly lonely voices shouting that those who don’t remember Keynes are doomed to repeat the worst of the past.

In practice, austerity has bitten deepest in a few countries in Europe that depended too much on the kindness of strangers – or at least on Germans - and in the US, because States mostly have to run balanced budgets, and in Britain (because the Brits are nuts). A new paper by Larry Summers and Brad DeLong demonstrates what Krugman has been saying – Austerity has been a miserable failure as economic policy, impoverishing millions and reducing economic output almost everywhere.

Krugman is astounded at the pigheadedness of the Lucasian economists and VSP who can’t bring themselves to acknowledge what the data show so clearly – that austerity is a miserable, and misery creating, failure. He attributes it to intellectual stubbornness and fear of admitting that one is wrong.

I have a more devious theory. If an obviously faulty theory is fiercely championed in the teeth of facts, I think, the size of somebody’s paycheck probably depends on it. But whose? Who benefits from a depressed economy and deflation? Not entrepreneurs. Not manufacturing. Not most service industries. And certainly not workers of any sort. Bankers? The rentier class? Well, maybe.

Those last two groups fear inflation like death, and have the money and power to control debate even when most of the facts aren’t on their side. They also really hate low interest rates. That’s my guess for the moment anyway. And my advice for Krugman is – don’t look for your explanation only in human vanity – look at whose pocketbook is in play.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Lumo has up a clever video of human powered flapping flight. It turns out to be a clever CGI fake, but I thought it might be fun to analyze the aerodynamics. Heavier than air fliers overcome gravity by accelerating air downward. That takes work against drag. It turns out that there are two components to that drag - so called induced drag that is a direct side effect of lift and frictional drag, often called form drag. Form drag is proportional to the square of velocity while induced drag is inversely proportional to the square of velocity - circumstances that combine to produce a velocity sweet spot of minimum drag that depends mostly on the wing loading, the ratio of mass to wing area.

That velocity sweet spot is given approximately by V = Sqrt[W/0.38A], where W is weight, A is area and the numerical factor (appropriate for MKS units) combines plausible values of air density and angle of attack. If we assume conservatively that the flier of the video plus equipment weighs at least 700 N (70 kg)and wing area is about 5 m^2 we get V = 19 m/s - an implausibly high velocity compared to what we see.

We can also compute the power needed to be expended against just induced drag at that speed. It's given approximately by
P = W^2/(rho*V*b^2),
where P is power, W is weight, rho is air density (1.2 kg/m^3), V is airspeed, and b is wingspan. If we figure b = 5 m for our aircraft, that works out to 860 Watts, more than 1 horsepower and a lot more than any athlete can sustain. There will also be a comparable contribution from form drag.

Real human powered aircraft feature 30 m wings with 30 m^2 of area, extensive streamlining, ultralight materials, and elite bicyclists retrained as pilot/power plants. They generate roughly 200 Watts and manage a speed of around 7 m/s. So the video is a fake, as CGI experts have independently established.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

In the next few years, I moved back and forth between my office in New York and the apartment I had rented in Jerusalem in order to help take care of my son on the weekends when he’d come home from his IDF service (the Tzanchanim—paratroopers).

It shouldn't surprise any student of history to find that the forces of ignorance and superstition are frequently triumphant in human affairs. Nor should we be surprised to find that our fellow humans much prefer to put off pain today even when the threat is of far greater pain tomorrow. That's the way that were are built.

So it seems to be with the debate over what to do about anthropogenic global warming, or AGW.

From time to time I wander over to LumoWorld or some other denialist site just to take the temperature of the ignoranti. The extent of their delusion on one point is particularly startling - they actually seem convinced that their view has the support of a substantial majority of scientists competent in the relevant disciplines. Not only do they believe the world is flat, but they think that most scientists agree!

Of course their delusion is promoted by a vast and wealthy propaganda network whose interests have nothing to do with science, a lot to do with ideology, and everything to do with energy sales. That fact is secondary, though. The main resistance to aggressive action against climate change comes from the practical fact that making energy more expensive is a direct threat to people's pocket books in the immediate term. Compared to a longer term catastrophe of uncertain dimensions that fact is huge.

Right now, there seems to be little or no appetite for any substantive action against climate change. Action against climate change is a losing hand, and likely to remain one for some time. I don't see much point in grand gestures - if you get tossed in the clink for protesting a pipeline, you are just going to inconvenience yourself - the world won't care. What can be done is to keep defending the truth and calling out the lie. Beyond that, we need to prepare for a world that will be considerably different.

Development of alternatives to fossil fuels is beneficial not only because it helps ameliorate the rate of AGW but because the fuels are running short and likely to be a continuing focus of intense geopolitical conflict. It would be nice if some provision could be made to aid those likely to be dispossessed by climate change - especially residents of low lying tropical islands and coastlines. Some efforts should be made to preserve species likely to be driven to extinction.

In any case, it seems unlikely that much substantive will happen until the tocsins of doom sound much more loudly. It will then probably be too late for most kinds of action, but much of the temperature increase over the next hundred years and sea level rise is already a done deal.

His point of view does not prevent him from taking a hard-eyed look at the history. Modern Zionism had several origins including pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe and a maturing Jewish nationalism, but got a big boost from Britain's attempts to grab Arab oil and preserve it's colony in India. Those efforts led the UK to encourage Jews to emigrate to Palestine and they built up the Jewish communities as a counterweight to the local Arabs by granting them special privileges and ruthlessly suppressing Palestinian efforts at self-determination.

Early Jewish land buying followed the logic of enclosure. Landlords, who for centuries had leased the land in sharecropping arrangements to local peasants, sold to Jews financed by foreign Jewish money, and the peasants were then pushed off the land to make way for the Kibbutz. Perfectly legal, but disastrous for peasants. The amount of land obtained in this way was tiny, only a few percent, but that fact plus the waves of emigrants now fleeing Europe and the Nazis were plenty to inspire Palestinian fear of being overwhelmed.

They responded with violence against Jewish settlers, and Jews in turn organized both a defense force and terror groups to respond. Jews were the first in the Middle East to use mass bombings of civilian marketplaces and other targets, but Palestinians learned to respond. Outraged Palestinians rose up but were crushed and slaughtered by the British, with thousands killed and leaders executed, imprisoned, or exiled.

After WWII, more refugee Jews flooded in from Europe, and the Jewish terrorists turned their bombs on the British. With strong support for the Jews coming from both the US - because of its big Jewish community - and the USSR, because the Zionists were socialists, Britain decided to cut its losses.

At that point, Jews were only a third of the population of Palestine, but unlike the Palestinians, they were well organized. Many had combat experience in Europe, and they were better armed. Most of the Arabs were completely untrained in combat, and their disorganized bands were slaughtered. Israeli tactics, especially those of the Irgun, led by two future Israeli Prime Ministers, were harsh. Deir Yasinn, a peaceful village which had had good relations with its Jewish neighbors, was an egregious example. Some hundreds of men, women and children were murdered. Members of the Hagganah, the Jewish Defense forces, reported that the Irgun had systematically raped and then murdered the women.

This incident led to a pattern of Palestinians fleeing when a village was taken. Lerner doesn't believe that there was a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians but there is no doubt that Jewish leaders generally approved of the idea. When a village was captured, reports Lerner, the Arab men would be rounded up, and some of them - ten or forty - would be lined up against a wall and shot. Not ethnic cleansing perhaps, but certainly a strong incentive to flee. Those who fled were never allowed to return.

Jews suffered huge casualties too, about 1% of the population - compare to three million dead if the US suffered comparably, and these losses doubtless played a part in the ferocity of the struggle.

That's how modern Israel was established, and it's not too different from the stories of other nations, including the US, except in scale. Nor is it too different from the instructions God gave to Aaron and his successors in the original foundation of Israel.

Honeybees (Apis mellifera) are more than cookie-cutter drones, workers, foragers and queens. They might have individual personality differences similar to our own, according to new research.
After studying hives—both in the wild and in the lab—and analyzing genetic and biochemical profiles of bees’ brains, researchers have found that some bees, like some humans, seem to be programmed to seek out new experiences, or novelty.
Forager bees are in charge of gathering food outside of the hive, but not all of these bees, it seems, are inclined to strike out and go exploring for new flowers. Only a subset of them—some five to 25 percent—actively scout out new pollen sources.

Even scarier is that the behavioral parallels seem to go all the way to the neuro-transmitter level.

Some genetic differences between scouting and non-scouting brains were predicted. “We expected to find some, but the magnitude of the differences was surprising given that both scouts and non-scouts are foragers,” Gene Robinson, director of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and co-author of the new study, said in a prepared statement. There were many minute genetic differences. But one of the biggest finds were distinct differences in 10 genes that help to control catecholamine, glutamate and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) signaling—signatures that have also been linked to novelty-seeking and reward behavior in humans.
To solidify their finding, the researchers tried changing the levels of these signals in scouting and non-scouting bees to see if they indeed affected their behavior. Non-scouting bees got extra glutamate and octopamine, while dopamine—a reward neurotransmitter—was inhibited in scouting bees. With these signals switched, the non-scouting bees became more inclined to go explore, and without dopamine, the scouting bees were less so.

Like to be (or bee) a Type-A personality for a week or so? Take this pill.

Come 2014, the Affordable Care Act will prevent insurers from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions: cancer victims and stroke survivors will be able to buy insurance at the same price as otherwise similar applicants. Insurance companies may take a hit to profits, but part of the cost will surely be passed on to the lower-cost counterparts to this high-cost pool. Healthy people might be tempted to opt out, but under the new law, they’ll be required to have insurance. This individual mandate is a natural fix to the problem of adverse selection in health insurance: It keeps the lowest-cost participants from opting out, and as a result the market doesn’t unravel.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these solutions rankle the likes of Ron Paul and other libertarians who see the heavy hand of government at work here.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

100 years ago, a pencil sharpener salesman and pulp novel fan decided he could write as well as the people he was reading and wrote the serialized novel A Princess of Mars. Five or six decades later, I fell under the spell of Edgar Rice Burroughs' books and the Mars they depicted. John Carter's Barsoom was a take on Percival Lowell's Mars, rather than the one we know today, a dying planet with canals and vestiges of civilization.

Consequently, I was a bit nervous going to see John Carter, since I was pretty sure they could find lots of ways to mess it up. I was pretty pleased with the result, though, even if Deejah Thoris and her maids insisted on wearing a certain, albeit not too large, amount of clothing, contrary to the naked except for jewelry way I remember them. It was pretty hard to take Carter, devotee of the God of War, as a pacifist, though.

Naturally the fight scenes were shot in the obligatory speeded up motion of contemporary cinema, with the result that they were pretty boring.

I saw it in 2-D, but I suppose it would be good in the 3-D version. For my taste, it was less sappy than Avatar and more fun in the final fights.

The recent effects at the European financial barber shop have left me more than a bit confused. Greece owed a lot but could not afford to pay, so a deal was arranged whereby most lenders “voluntarily” accepted a roughly 70% haircut or payout at 30 cents on the dollar. A few percent of borrowers declined the deal, triggering a “credit event” ruling from some somebodies somewhere (the ISDA committee), causing credit default swap (CDS) policies to become payable. Somehow, though, Greece had been able to insert and activate collective action clauses (CACs) in most of the loans, which presumably made them immune to their CDS protections.

Friday, March 09, 2012

Science and engineering have been intricately linked since the beginning. New developments in science frequently spring from exploitation of engineering triumphs, and fundamental advances in science usually trigger an explosion in engineering innovation. This was brought home to me in recent discussions with some important biologists who describe what they do as biological engineering.

The radical advances in electrodynamics and thermodynamics in the nineteenth century led to the rapid economic and technological advances of the latter part of that century and the first half of the twentieth. The twentieth century exploration of the atomic scale gave rise to the transistor and molecular biology. So far, the twenty-first century is looking like the age of biological engineering.

Some of the things that these bio-engineers are up to look downright weird to this old-timer: building logic gates based on cellular signalling and regulator proteins, or protein and nucleic acid signalling chains. Others seem more natural but still radical, such as using supervised evolution to build new catalytic proteins out of non-canonical amino acids.

None of these bio-engineers appeared to believe that there were a lot of fundamental mysteries in biology or biochemistry to unravel, though they all seemed to think that there were plenty of fun technical tricks still to learn.

Thursday, March 08, 2012

It seems that Landsburg has been chastised by his University President for his rash words ala Rush. He is, however, unchastened, partly, I suppose, because he has tenure, but mainly, I guess, because he is a clueless git who doesn't understand what he did wrong.

It seem pretty clear that not only has physics hit a severe dry spell, but all other sciences have been largely reduced to physics. Only cosmology and astronomy still seem to pose fundamental unsolved problems, but those might prove inaccessible. In physics we still have lots of untested theories but not much prospect for testing them. Biology and Chemistry, like most of Physics, are pretty much branches of engineering now. Meteorology and Geology still have some nuggets perhaps, but the big points seem pretty clear. Neuroscience remains messy, but eventually all those threads will doubtless be sorted out too, and it doesn't look like many big surprises are still awaiting.

Wednesday, March 07, 2012

...........though I'd always thought of the brothers Koch as more Blofeld than Khan.

My personal distaste for libertarianism is rooted in dislike of its moral principles and disdain for its impracticality, but gets a big boost from the idea that libertarians are really just front men for the oligarchy.

The Cato Institute probably had as much claim to intellectual seriousness as any of the right wing "think" tanks - by which I mean a little, but not much, and apparently had some people in it who occasionally allowed an independent thought to invade their minds. This was apparently too much for the brothers Koch, who used their money and power to stage a putsch against the management. Noahpinion has a masterful dissection:

Given my history of critiquing libertarianism, it would hardly be surprising if I felt a flash of gleeful schadenfreude to see the dismay with which so many movement libertarians are reacting to the Koch takeover of the Cato Institute. But I don't. I just feel sad. Here are a bunch of smart people who truly, honestly believe in their worldview - a worldview that shares some key elements with my own - discovering for the first time that they are in fact merely a proxy army for people who don't take them or their worldview seriously at all.

To those of us outside the movement, the fact that libertarians are a proxy army has always been painfully obvious. The key piece of evidence was always the set of issues that libertarians chose to emphasize. Most Americans share the belief that civil liberties are good, war is to be avoided, and high taxes are bad. But the fact that our country's libertarian movement spent so much time fighting high taxes and so little time fighting the encroaching authoritarianism of conservative presidential administrations was a clear sign that some priorities were seriously out of place. Should we really be more afraid of turning into Sweden than turning into Singapore? The contrast between libertarians' continual jeremiads against taxes and their muted, intermittent criticism of things like warrantless wiretaps, executive detention, and torture was a huge tip-off that the movement was really just some kind of intellectual front for America's right wing.

The thing is, the soldiers in this proxy army didn't seem to realize they were a proxy army. They appeared, and appear, to truly believe in their synthetic ideology; they seemed deeply convinced of the Rand/Nozick idea that taxes and environmental regulation represented a more dire threat to human freedom than the authoritarianism that had been the bane of earlier freedom advocates since Enlightenment.

Sunday, March 04, 2012

Scientists have come up with device for silencing speech, but the hand-held "Speechjammer" has people talking up a storm. The scientists--from Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology--said in a new paper that the experimental device is designed to help curb "inappropriate speech in public places." But one can easily imagine how the gun-like gizmo might be used as a "weapon" against loud-mouthed protestors and others who voice unpopular opinions.
...
The computer-controlled device features a microphone and a loudspeaker that plays back a speaker's voice 0.2 second later. The fraction-of-a-second delay in playback--a phenomenon scientists call delayed auditory feedback--confuses the speaker and makes it hard to continue speaking.

Consider climate change, brutal winter in Europe, mild winter in US, and another early and severe start to the US tornado season. Are they connected? Well, the last three are, and a plausibility argument can be made for the first, but the connection is hardly iron clad.

The same positioning of the Polar vortex that brought a brutal winter to Europe made the US winter surprisingly mild, and it too contributed to the abnormal jet stream that promoted the tornadoes. The unusually mild winter also meant the US Midwest lacked snow cover at a time of year when it usually does, and that in turn meant sharper temperature differentials across the front that spawned the tornadoes.

Saturday, March 03, 2012

Rush Limbaugh is used to being the recipient of apologies, not the bearer, but he has apologized to Sandra Fluke for calling her a "slut." Bailing sponsors, threat of a zillion dollar lawsuit, or a sudden attack of human decency? I would guess the middle option, but who knows?

Friday, March 02, 2012

The NFL has announced that an extensive investigation has revealed that the NO Saints ran a bounty system for the past three seasons which rewarded players for injuring opponents. From the NYT:

During the past three seasons, while the National Football League has been changing rules and levying fines in an effort to improve player safety, members of the New Orleans Saints’ defense maintained a lucrative bounty system that paid players for injuring opponents, according to an extensive investigation by the N.F.L.
The bounty system was financed mostly by players — as many as 27 of them — and was administered by the former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, who also contributed money to the pool. The N.F.L. said that neither Coach Sean Payton nor General Manager Mickey Loomis did anything to stop the bounties when they were made aware of them or when they learned of the league’s investigation.
According to the league, Loomis did not even stop the bounties when ordered to by the team’s owner.

I predict a few minor wrist slaps - it's not like crippling an opponent was something serious like running a dogfight - and everybody forgets about it. Though I wouldn't bet on Drew Breeze making it through next season in one piece.

If the NFL were serious, it would impose lifetime or at least multi-season bans on the guilty GM and coaches. Players should sit out at least half a season.

What the virginal Flush and Friend forget to mention is that their real beef is with the law, passed by our elected representatives, that mandate employer covered health-coverage, and the fact that Ms. Fluke had the temerity to defend it against certain moralist's attempts to carve out special exemptions to that law.

Treasury Secretary Geithner happened to mention that rich Americans should expect to pay more taxes as part of the privilege of being American. Naturally this provoked a spasm of outrage from the Wall Street Journal, which took the form of this benighted nonsense from Larry Lindsey, an apparently dimwitted predecessor. Lindsey bases his attack on a concept of "privilege" unrooted in language, history, or law and a conflation of privilege with inalienable right.
Mr. Lindsey seems unaware of the fact that root meaning of "privilege" is a special right granted by law but not available to all, or indeed of the fact that Jefferson never argued for an inalienable right of everyone to be an American or avoid taxes. Less than 5 % of the World's population has been accorded that first privilege, and we guard it jealously, but not jealously enough to have denied it to the WSJ's foreign born owner, a mistake which continues to bear evil fruit.